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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9425808" data-attributes="member: 18">I've never seen that be an actual issue caused by online tools.I've seen players not understand their own numbers, but I've seen that since 2E, it's usually just players forgetting stuff. And it's pretty rare. Also the character sheets presented by Beyond are really obvious - it would be very hard not to know how a number was derived, so I'd be interested to hear exactly what tool it was that gave you this problem.Not in my experience.I've played 4E with people totally new to RPGs and they had no real problems, because of the discrete packets of information 4E uses, and the DDI handling the calculations for the most part, so they only need to add/subtract numbers I tell them. Also at low levels, there just aren't that many numbers to add/subtract in 4E.Plus the other players help them too. So to me this seems like a made-up situation based on something you're afraid of, not something that actually happened to you.If you had an entirely new group (or like, all but one), and like, started them at level 10 or something, I guess I could see this happening, but in the course of normal play? I not only think it doesn't, but know it doesn't, because I've played 4E where I introduced new players, even two at once one time, both totally new to TT RPGs and not really video gamers either (fantasy novel readers primarily). They actually really enjoyed it. We did make sure they picked fairly playable characters, but that doesn't mean ultra-simple ones - one was a Dragonborn Spellblade for example. Admittedly these weren't people with problems doing basic math, but I wouldn't recommend any version of D&D to people with those - there are a lot of other RPGs which work better.I do agree that different version of D&D offload knowledge requirements differently, but the way 4E packages information is good at fighting player overload at low levels. 3.XE was much, much worse in my experience because of the vast numbers of specific rules and exceptions and so on, it made it painful as hell both to play and DM, if you were going RAW/RAI, rather than fast-and-loose.</blockquote>

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